Prince famously sang, “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s
1999.” Perhaps he should have made it 1499, because, according
to Butte, Mont., native Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book Dancing
in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy, we haven’t
had much real fun since the early stages of modern capitalism
at the dawn of the 16th century. While that certainly is a
bummer, Ehrenreich’s latest book is no buzzkill. Rather, it’s
a thoroughly researched and much-welcome argument on behalf
of ritualized communal ecstasy—by which she means possession
of the soul by rakish, egalitarian gods who promote the sort
of revelry that is, generally speaking, bad for the Gross
Domestic Product.

But if ragers and raves negatively impact the bottom line,
think of how detrimental wanton merrymaking would have been
to early humans who should have been reserving their calories
for hunting and warding off predators. Yet, party on they
did. And they—we—survived. Dancing in the Streets begins
with a review of the evolutionary function of dance, traces
the many incarnations of Dionysus in early civilization, and
then chronicles the onset of despair that accompanied capitalism
and the growth of the modern economy. The commentary in these
portions of the book will fascinate nonspecialists interested
in anthropology, Greek and Roman history, the Age of Enlightenment
and the Industrial Revolution. Experts in these fields may
learn nothing new, but I suspect the precision and scope of
Ehrenreich’s research and some of her bold assertions will
impress.

Her best moments occur when she examines the centralized repression
of joy. With the growth of cities and the rise of factories
came a radical diminishment in both the number of feast days
(more than 100 in many feudal societies) and the space available
for celebrations. Furthermore, at public festivities, the
masses often were called upon to be spectators—of a royal
procession, perhaps, or even some sort of punishment—rather
than participants in dancing rituals. Ehrenreich points out
that synchronous body movement, costumes and masks momentarily
erase class divisions, while, on the other hand, watching
the powerful perform further emphasizes the distinction between
the haves and the have-nots. This may sound like Sociology
101, but Ehrenreich defends these broad claims with a precise
account of the end of swashbuckling, the rise of table manners
among the aristocracy (including the decline of farting and
falling asleep at the table), and the first official diagnoses
of melancholy, which by the start of the 17th century she
argues was an epidemic in England. In the midst of this analysis,
Ehrenreich poses a simple but poignant question: “Could this
apparent decline in the ability to experience pleasure be
in any way connected with the decline in opportunities for
pleasure, such as carnival and other traditional festivities?”

Unfortunately, as Ehrenreich’s study ap proaches contemporary
America, her observations become decidedly less astute and
her normally incisive prose gets breezy. Writing about the
history of rock & roll and its connection to ecstatic
African rituals, she notes, “One way to expand the festival
into an ongoing community was to take to the road and go from
one concert or festival to another. ‘Deadheads,’ fans of the
Grateful Dead, formed a floating community that followed the
band from city to city ‘in elderly bread vans and decommissioned
school buses painted with rust primer and furnished with curtains
and the kind of mattresses that are chucked under lampposts
at 3 a.m.’” Why Ehrenreich feels the need to quote a source
here is anybody’s guess, but odder still is the false crescendo
she reaches at the end of the chapter when she closes her
argument with uncharacteristic banality: “People of course
continue to seek pleasure through shopping, drinking, and
forms of prepackaged entertainment that are mildly engaging
at best. But the news is out, and has been at least since
the 1960s: We are capable of so much more.”

The analysis remains cursory in the following chapter when
Ehrenreich examines sporting events. Discussing American football,
she remarks, “More elaborately, American fans had, by the
1950s, started the day hours before the game with tailgate
parties in the arena parking lots, usually featuring grilled
meats or regional specialties.” She proceeds to discuss the
wave and sports bars. Like the bit about the Grateful Dead,
this information might have a place in a history textbook
published 100 years from now, but encountering it here in
this antiquated voice is almost comical. I imagine an elderly
orientation staffer telling a bunch of frat boys about keg
stands or a middle-school teacher breaking the news to students
that there’s a bunch of really cool stories about a kid named
Harry Potter.

As an admirer of Ehrenreich’s work, reading the end of this
book was like watching a favorite slugger whiff in a big spot
or catching Bob Dylan on an off night. But the flat contemporary
notes do not undermine Ehrenreich’s larger historical argument:
Global capitalism and collective ecstasy are, very likely,
mutually exclusive. Modern technological entertainments such
as iPods and YouTube may be nifty, but Dionysus can hardly
possess you in the great green fields of cyberspace.